Our Client

The word 'KEVRI' translates from the Cornish language as 'contribute' which aligns with the company's mission to facilitate knowledge exchange and impactful contributions between academia and industry.

KEVRI provides a digital platform that helps staff to capture and showcase their Knowledge Exchange contributions. This initiative not only aids in evidencing social and economic value for Knowledge Exchange but also aims to enhance innovation and impact pipelines through data-backed decisions and win funding bids with impact-led project plans.

Challenge

KEVRI is addressing the challenge of capturing and showcasing the contributions of university research and knowledge exchange activities in a compelling and measurable way.

The problem KEVRI solves revolves around the difficulty that universities and academic staff face in demonstrating the social and economic value of their Knowledge Exchange (KE) efforts. KE includes a wide range of activities, such as research collaborations, consultancy, public engagement, and the development of intellectual property, among others, which contribute significantly to innovation and societal progress.

Despite the importance of these activities, effectively evidencing their impact and value can be challenging. This difficulty arises from the diverse nature of KE activities, the complexity of measuring their outcomes, and the need to communicate their benefits to a wide range of stakeholders, including funding bodies, government agencies, industry partners, and the public.

By providing a platform that helps to capture, evidence, and showcase these contributions, KEVRI aims to enhance the visibility and understanding of the significance of university research and knowledge exchange. This, in turn, supports the attraction of greater investment into the field, helps universities make data-backed decisions to enhance their innovation and impact pipelines, and ultimately contributes to societal and economic development.

Approach

1. Industry Knowledge: Seeai spent time expanding their knowledge of the UK higher education sector to understand the knowledge exchange process within universities. This allowed us to tailor the software to specifically streamline these processes and enhance the efficiency of capturing knowledge exchange activities.

2. User-First Development Focus: kevri-hero During the initial phase of developing KEVRI software, the team strategically avoided a full-scale development approach. Instead, Seeai helped refine the project's scope to prioritize features that would have the most significant impact and changes requested the most by users. This user-first development focus enabled Seeai to build a solution that addressed the biggest challenges within the Knowledge Exchange domain.

3. Quick Turnaround Time: By providing quick iterations and continuous stakeholder engagement, Seeai could gather precise feedback from various UK universities. This process was crucial in pinpointing specific problems and aligning the development with the real needs of the end users, resulting in a more impactful and user-friendly product.

4. Agile Approach: Our agile approach allowed us to strategize and develop a product that fit the needs of clients. KEVRI secured contracts with three UK universities within three months of development, demonstrating the effectiveness of our focused agile development process.

Results

KEVRI, in partnership with Seeai, built a highly valuable software platform that minimizes administrative burden by automatically mapping project data to relevant reporting frameworks.

The platform allows higher education and organizations to identify, capture and plan collaborative partnerships, align it with impact evaluation methods, suggested output metrics, and create comprehensive case studies.

It also serves as a central repository for academic work and provides KE managers with a better understanding of institutional knowledge exchange activities, optimizing data gathering and analysis.

Find out more about KEVRI here: KEVRI or connect with founders Emily and Natalie on LinkedIn for further information.